[Apocalypse World] Car Mountain

[Mikael]

(Check out the previous session if you want. This report focuses on the mechanics and is much lighter on the fiction, as I cannot write fiction worth the feel we get playing the game.)

All right, we are done with sessions 3 and 4, collective covering a foray up the Car Mountain. These sessions played with the old playbooks, since I noticed the update on the site only in the middle of the 4th session. We end up checking out the operator, which looked really cool, and one of the players immediately took moonlighting as an advance.

In the two sessions, the characters fought some dogs and confronted the parents of the three guys murdered by Snow when springing the angel from the Tent City. They also were tempted by something very mechanical in the Mountain, meeting with a giant cow made of car parts, and losing their mechanic to the temptation. I was really confused that they just let the mechanic go, considering the effect this loss will have on their holding's motor pool, but now that I think of it, they might have been too spooked with the whole mechanical parts used to fix wounds on people.

Overall, play was really effortless, with an easy connection between the rules and fiction. Playbooks continue to deliver the feel of the setting, as well as being just complex enough in their simplicity.

There was first PvP as the players discussed who gets to sleep in the cabin, the driver or the skinner. This set up some future stuff nicely, although with the changing playbooks I am not certain what's going to happen... But we will come back to that. Right now I want to say that the players liked the way the PvP works in Apocalypse World - you can have fight, and one guy can give up, but that does not mean that they give up the control of the character. Nice!

We also used the battle rules, twice, when they fought the dogs. The battle rules worked fine, giving a nice structure for setup and incidental threats, then moving to full-out combat, and fading away just at the right time when the 6 ticks were up. Visceral and intensive. Players also dug the battle moves.

For these two sessions, we used "go for it" instead of the old "make a break for it", and it worked just right for our purposes, the possible outcomes being applicable in many situations. (But now that whole thing seems to be out of the new playbooks, so we'll see.)

Every player got their first advances in these two sessions, and after the second session the skinner's Hx with the battlebabe dropped from +4 to +1. We justified this by the fact that the skinner delivered the "true story" about the angel to the leader of their own holding, at the request of the Tent City's hardholder - and this true story might cause some serious trouble for the battlebabe in the future.

As for the advances, we have a rule regarding the "moves from other playbooks" option, where the player can select one other playbook to choose from, without reading it. If they do not find anything they like, they can pick another advancement option. This is to both keep the in-play advancements from dragging while everyone reads all the playbooks again, as well as to keep the other playbooks a bit fresh, since I am constantly mining them for names and tropes.

Oh yeah, a confession. I am not using the fronts mechanically. I have not fully statted them out, because that seems like too much work. But I do use them as an inspiration for threat types and special moves, and make sure that the threats I have progress, even if I do not use the clock.

Regarding the power creep that Graham and others have mentioned elsewhere: This has not become a problem for us, yet. Players keep failing and I aim to challenge them in areas that are not necessarily their forté, thus prompting constant choices between sort of sensible action and doing something over the top using their strengths. We tended to do things "under fire" and "making a break for it", both moves where you really need a 10 to really get what you want.

I wonder a bit about the balance between NPC and PC harm. Especially the battlebabe with his reactions and the driver in his car have enough armor and enough ticks on the clock to make most normal physical harms not immediate threats, while the NPCs with some armor seem to be rather fragile, with the rules stating that they are pretty much out of the game with only 2 harm. The thinking behind this might be something interesting to discuss on the blog.

Ok, new playbooks with their overhauled moves. Thanks for fixing the barter for the skinner, we had fun with that. Otherwise, we will take the new moves into use in the next session - for example, going aggro looks much clearer now. Couple of pre-concerns we identified at the end of this session:

1. The skinner had 3 hold over the driver - a delicious situation with the whole "at 6 make good or it's off" and the randomness of getting either 1 or 3 hold. The new move for seduction and manipulation has given up on this dynamic, even if it looks interesting otherwise.

2. While "trying to seize something by force" looks like a good and useful move, it does not seem to be a replacement for the way we used "going for it". The latter was useful in many kinds of situations that were not necessarily aggressive.

[lumpley]

Mikael, very cool.

I'm excited to hear about how the new moves work out for you, so thank you for switching to them.

While "trying to seize something by force" looks like a good and useful move, it does not seem to be a replacement for the way we used "going for it". The latter was useful in many kinds of situations that were not necessarily aggressive.

I think and hope that for those non-aggressive situations, you'll be able to fall back upon "doing something under fire." Let me know if that doesn't work - let me know if you run into a time when you would have used "go for it," but now neither "seize by force" NOR "act under fire" work.

-Vincent